Singapore-based metaverse startup, BUD, has raised $36.8 million in its latest funding round and is planning to launch a novel NFT collection.
Sequoia Capital India led the Series B round that also saw participation from Chinese billionaire William Lei Ding’s online and mobile games company NetEase, Chinese VC firms ClearVue Partners and Northern Light Venture Capital, and existing investors, including GGV Capital, Qiming Venture Partners, and Source Code Capital.
BUD is collaborating with leading global technology companies, including Snap, Huawei, Meta, Tencent, and ByteDance. The company has emerged as one of the largest UGC platforms globally, with over 10 million users.
The platform has been on the charts for the top ten social apps in 38 countries, as revealed by Sequoia Capital India investment advisors Aakash Kapoor and Shenya Wang.
“We’re super psyched about the new age social and creative world BUD is inviting young people to help build, and the roadmap the team has laid out for BUD’s fast-growing user base,” said Kapoor and Wang.
BUD plans to use the funds to build and launch its Web3 products, the ‘new’ Internet powered by blockchain technology. The company will roll out its NFT projects to enable its users to own and trade virtual assets within the metaverse.
The company was founded in 2019 by former Snapchat engineers, Risa Feng and Shawn Lin. It is targeting the GenZ with the generation of personalized figures that can interact in the metaverse.
BUD is the latest Asian-based entrant to the growing metaverse space. In other instances, one of Hong Kong’s largest hotel chains, Regal Hotel Group, has acquired virtual properties in blockchain gaming platforms Decentraland and the Sandbox. Korean billionaire Chang Byung-gyu, the founder of online game developer Krafton, invested about $6.5 million in two digital art companies developing non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for the metaverse.
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